Hello everybody (or the 2 people that actually read this forum still..),

It was a long time since the last update on this topic. I have been doing other stuff, and not being successful with getting a trailer to work I kinda got so frustrated with the RC stuff for a while that I didn’t want to touch it. But now as the days are getting shorter again and I can spend more time inside, I went back the the RC tractor and controller.

Since the last time, I’ve pretty much updated everything. Not much has changed, but little things.

Let’s start with the controller. It got the biggest update of them all, although I wasn’t very successful with it. It now has switches instead of jumpers for the address selection. Also two additional Potentiometers got added for who knows what in the future. Additionally I have a switch now to turn the “inertia simulation” on and off, and there’s a switch to change between low and high power output, but that is not implemented yet. The last switch uses a analog Input and I think INPUT_PULLUP doesn’t work on those, so I have to add a pullup resistor before implementing it. Maybe I remove that switch again and instead put a LED there as a status light for things, now that I moved from PA_LEVEL_MIN to PA_LEVEL_LOW I can control the vehicle on the other side of the room no issues, so I think this settings if fine for most things anyways.

But, here’s a picture of the thing

Sadly, the switches I used for switching the channels are absolutely useless. They are the worst switches I ever had as they simply don’t work. Or lets say, most of them don’t work. Some work fine.. Others don’t stay in the “on” position, well they do physically but the contacts in them don’t. So I have to hold and press against the switch in order to have it “on”, which of course is stupid for the address selection. But I bought them months back so no way to return them..

Now back to the tractor. A few things changed visually, but also the electronics changed a bit. When I tried the tractor out after sitting for a while I had some sort of lose connection somewhere as it kept cutting out. While trying to figure out where it fault was I shorted out something with the Multimeter probe and after that the entire tractor was dead. But with a bit of testing I found out that the Arduino was fine and only the NRF module had died. I tried to unsolder it and replace it, but in doing that I pulled some traces off of my NRF Baseboard. So I made a new one.

I’ve also moved the NRF a bit further back to make a bit more room under the hood, so it worked out well at the end. The other thing I changed was, previously I fed the 8V from the batteries to the raw input of the arduino, so it and the vcc of the motor controller run on the Arduinos internal 5V regulator. Now I’ve done away with that and both get the 3.3v from the AMS1117 3.3v regulator, as the Arduino just runs fine with this setup in my other tests and in the controller. So one less failure point, one less voltage level in the tractor and thus less wiring.. And I think some of the instability/cutting out I got might have been down to this also.

Here would be some pictures of the PCB, but as I have misplaced the SD card those were on I can only show you some pictures of the tractor in its current state and no details on the PCB. But I will post these as soon as I find the SD card agai.. 😉

I hope you don’t mind the absolute mess on my desc.. Here’s some pictures of the tractor with the hood and everything mounted.

And you can see the trailer in the background. Its a different story all together.. But I might have it working somewhat by now.. Maybe in the next post 😉

And the current version of the D16006 tractor code (note that I have used the trailer/implement communication code from the RC-Tractor-Guy Library, so big thanks to that again 🙂 )https://pastebin.com/JUNuuEP4 (Also, the address system is fixed in this version.. 😀 )